Insightful ramblings from one dirty hippie

I’d like to talk about Billboard Liberation. No, not THAT Billboard Liberation. But rather liberation of billboards that should already be illegal. For you may remember that some years ago the fine citizens of the city of San Angeles passed a ballot measure banning any new billboards in their fair city (Proposition G IIRC.) An exemption was given to Muni with, I assume, most people viewing this exemption as allowing Muni to raise a little bit of cash on the side by continuing to place advertisements on the sides of their buses. Well it seems the clever folks at Texas based Clear Channel put their heads together and concluded that this exemption for Muni was the only way that they could continue to proliferate their obnoxious advertising, against the wishes of the voter of the city of San Angeles. And so they set about replacing most every existing bus stop with new bus stops equipped with brightly lit billboards. They didn’t stop there however. They even placed structures come distance away from the nearest bus stop that were entirely comprised of well lit billboards; essentially lining all of Market St. all the way to The Castro with new advertisements.

But my point for discussing this is that someone has finally taken this opportunity for Direct Action and ran with it, transforming this illegal advertising for corporate gain into informing the public of an opportunity to make their own voice be heard. Friend and former fellow KZSU DJ Steve Lambert writes that The California Department of Corrections has rehabilitated some of these bus stop billboards, transforming them into Ad Council style informational resources informing us of the #Occupy The Banks action taking place later today, Jan. 20th. Kudos for that.

My hope is that more of these billboards are coaxed into doing the right thing and rehabilitated away from illegal advertising and into doing good. Even some simple wheat-pasting would go a long way toward moving them down the path to a better tomorrow. I think we should all stand in support of that happening.

So I just learned of this song tonight, and I’ve got to say that my jaw must have dropped completely to the floor. Simply amazing!! Complete with lyrics like “do do do do do do do do” and “pitch down voice” and “bwah bwah bwah”, and best of all “some kind of vocal thing here.”

I’ve already listened to it a few times and I’m ready for more. Someone please play it on a large sound system!!

Considering that the 400 wealthiest Americans have wealth equal to 154 million Americans, while paying an average of 17.4% in federal taxes, it’s no wonder that the potential of change brings a little fear. Sadly, that American ethos of fairness seems to be 100% lost on this crowd.

The result of this unfairness seems to be the prime reason that Occupy Wall Street happened in the first place. Now this movement seems to be ready to head to the corporate Board Rooms, where these 400 wealthiest truly rule. Read about their fears here.

This is possibly a little bit longer than most folks’ attention span, but worth your time. It begins with a demonstration of the complete hypocrisy from those in charge. It’s called “I am not moving.” The title was apparently taken from the words of a demonstrator who is shown about half way through the film.

The Activist Post just published an article chronicling a little known side affect of prescription drugs over the past 27 years. The fact that there have been 0 deaths as a result of vitamins and over 3 million deaths related to prescription drug use in those 27 years, the complete timeframe that the data has been available. In fact, in 2009, drugs exceeded the amount of traffic-related deaths, killing at least 37,485 people nationwide. I’ll assume that this comes as a shock to many people. I too was unaware of this fact.

One thing I WAS aware of is a movie that speaks about well being in the current atmosphere, and the role that pharmaceuticals and diet play in relation to our well being. You can see it for free for a few more days, and it’s called Food Matters.

As summarized on the Food Matters’ website, by watching this film you will get answers to the following questions, and straight facts on:

How you can use food as medicine

Who needs vitamins?

Is organic really better?

How safe is your food?

Foods that fight anxiety and depression

Natural therapies for cancer

Which drugs might do more harm than good?

The best ways to detox, lose weight and keep it off!

It’s definitely a powerful, eye-opening movie and I’d suggest you watch it while you have the opportunity.

It’s just been reported that the people behind the bing.com search engine have been utilizing some unethical methods to gather their search engine results. Based on what’s being reported from Google’s headquarters, it seems that the Bing.com search results are being influenced by the Bing Toolbar feature within Internet Explorer.

It turns out that last summer some Google engineers noticed something truly strange about a misspelled search result on both Google, and then subsequently Bing.com. This lead them down the path of verifying their suspicion, just like any good engineer/scientist would do. You can read all about Bing’s sneaky methods here.

And the way that the Google engineers went about validating their suspicion is something that has been used time and time again. They basically set up what amounted to a “Honey Pot.” They set out a tasty treat and waited to see who took the bait. In this case, the way in which that bait was reeled in was the Bing toolbar. (Which brings me to my suggestion that you should never install a toolbar from ANY source. Google included.)

Anyway, it seems that Google caught their prey red handed. Read the details and have a chuckle.

Honey pots have mainly been used to catch spammers. I’ve even done similar, choosing to utilize what once was a free service to create unique, unguessable email addresses that I would ONLY share with sites where I was creating an account. That service was sneakemail.com BTW, and the types of email addresses they would give you, which would be automatically forwarded to your regular email account, were along the lines of te6ki3qj2b0t@sneakemail.com and are obviously not going to be subject to a dictionary attack or anything similar (other than a random character string generator.) Each email address allows you to specify a description for it, which I chose use to identify the website I disclosed the newly generated email address to as part of the signup process. An interesting result was that I found less unscrupulous websites than I expected (somewhere less than 1% IIRC.) But those websites who chose to sell (or “trade”) my email address meant that the email address was soon unusable. So I would simply turn it off and never hear from the black hat website again, nor anyone who acquired the tainted email address.

That was a fun experiment. Just as it appears that the bing.com experiment was fun for the Google engineers. Bravo.

Oh, if you’d like me to provide the list of folks who leaked those sneakemail.com addresses out, leave a comment and I’ll try to dig up the lists from my archives.

It was interesting to see Bernanke on 60 Minutes this past weekend. Almost every time he spoke his upper lip was twitching. Now I’m not a psychologist by any stretch of the imagination, but my understanding is that this sort of body language is a pretty high indicator that a person is lying.

But one HIGHLY INTERESTING thing that was mentioned and confirmed without hesitation is that the U.S. currently has the HIGHEST income disparity EVER!! Bernanke didn’t even blink at that one. I think that even empires such as the Roman Empire knew the benefit in people paying their fair share in taxes. And even THAT empire ended.

If I were a betting man, I’d be placing my bets that this grand experiment we call U.S. Democracy is on it’s last legs. It’s just not sustainable. And I think the reaction of The Fed is showing us that.

So consider the value of those Federal Reserve Notes that you are holding, and consider their possible future worth. Especially in the context of a society who is choosing to operate in as an inequitable manner as it’s choosing to operate today.

Then consider the alternatives, such as Barter, or such as investing in foreign currencies (China, or India anyone??)

We’ve seen that our Legislators certainly aren’t listening to us, and certainly aren’t learning from history (or common sense. I mean, $250k/yr. is “middle class” in 2010???? According to the Census Bureau, there were 129,925,421 households in 2009, with an AVERAGE INCOME of $52,029. WHERE IN H E Dubble Toothpicks do people in the Capital Hill Bubble come up with the idea that $250k/yr. is Middle Income??) And even more important, how does that instill confidence? You’ve got me! All I can do is repeat my view of the current administration in song lyrics terms, which are “Meet the New Boss, same as the Old Boss. (I know plenty of you Tea Party kool-aid drinkers would disagree.) But from where I sit, the prospects for the future don’t look good.

A really good thing that I like to do in trying to decipher these sorts of quandaries is to do my best to step outside of my own ego-based shell and try to answer a simple question. “How do I think I would feel about this situation if I were thinking in terms of the experience of ANYONE I met in life today?” And if I were to answer that question NOW, I’d have to consider the realm of possibilities from the obviously psychotic woman (who would be so much better served under psychiatric care) on the bus this morning, who likely lives in poverty, to the possibilities of the founder of Salesforce.com. For it was on a bus on the way to a salesforce.com conference that I encountered that psychotic woman screaming at her imaginary enemy.

And it’s from that sort of experience that I can only glean the fact that things are pretty messed up. Indeed they are pretty messed up in a society that believes that earning $250K/yr. is “middle class.” What do YOU believe?